Matthew Shipp proves once again why he belongs in the upper echelon of modern jazz pianists.

The Conduct of Jazz

As an art form, jazz has been around long enough for people to be led to believe that it comes with a certain code of conduct. The ones who want you to believe that are also likely to want to preserve the genre in its mid-20th century form. To them, constant musical evolution is for the accident-prone and the reckless. Yet Matthew Shipp, one of the more distinct composers and forward-thinking pianists of the blessedly cluttered post-bop landscape, went and named his album The Conduct of Jazz. To be clear, Shipp isn't all about obliterating the past in order to point a way to the future. Like all sensible musicians who had the courage to carve out their own voice in this bloated world, he's plucking a few of yesterday's flowers out of the ground while he strolls confidently into tomorrow. The album's title track has very unmistakable echoes of Duke Ellington in the rhythms and Thelonious Monk in the harmonies, but "The Conduct of Jazz" sure doesn't sound like a throwback.

Neither does Matthew Shipp's new trio, which features drummer Newman Taylor Baker and bassist Nichael Bisio. Instead of just keeping a beat, Baker responds to the music filling the air around him and complimenting it in a variety of ways, including mimicking Shipp's rhythms on his cymbals. Bisio fills the standard roll of double bassist for the album's first two tracks just fine, but the bowing technique he uses to start "Ball in Space" is almost dangerous with its use of overtones. Tension is built with Baker's mallets on the cymbals, then that tension is broken by Shipp making sudden thunder cracks on his keyboard. This "Ball in Space", presumably the earth, is one tumultuous sounding rock, and the saga of the elements probably would have sounded sheepish in the hands of another band.

As a writer, Matthew Shipp has that unique ability to string together a series of notes and chords in such a way that 1) you nearly stop what you're doing, 2) you have difficulty in your mind qualifying the music as "jazz", and 3) you never forget the melodies and harmonies, no matter how odd they may be. Opener "Instinctive Touch" walks in the Shipp tradition of past numbers like "Gesture", "Space Shipp", and "New Orbit" where just a few well-placed notes evokes a deep, towering structure. Being neither major nor minor, the main figure in "Primary Form" dangles unresolved in the midst of a chamber jazz breakdown that allows for a rather unorthodox solo from the drum kit. "Blue Abyss", true to its title, encapsulates both groove and mystery. Final track "The Bridge Across" seems to embody an entire jazz set within its 12-minute run time. When you quantify the rises and falls, the structures and the jams, the quiet and the loud all within this one track that makes up 24 percent of the album, you may need a nap after listening.

Matthew Shipp has, by and large, spent a few decades meeting the high expectations he has cultivated for himself. With each new release, be it solo or with a different trio, he seems to pluck music from the air that sounds so fresh and inviting yet we feel like we should have heard it all somewhere before. It's easy to believe that anyone would have a finite amount of music of that caliber within them, but The Conduct of Jazz shows that Matthew Shipp is not destined to be one of them.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.